


Relict Strata

by Fistful_of_Gamma_Rays



Series: Wandering Stars [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Episode: s02e07 Space Mall, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-02-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:02:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22535938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fistful_of_Gamma_Rays/pseuds/Fistful_of_Gamma_Rays
Summary: The shady knife-seller tells him the knife is made of luxite. That may or may not mean something.
Series: Wandering Stars [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1681486
Comments: 16
Kudos: 73





	Relict Strata

“ _Reeeaaal_ quality work here. Luxite, amirite? Don’t see much of that these days - planet doesn’t even exist anymore. Where’d you get it?”

“Someone gave it to me.” 

“Huh.” The knife-seller eyes Keith consideringly. “One thousand GAC.”

He can feel his shoulders start to tense. “It’s not for sale.”

“Two thousand.”

“No. Give it back.”

The knife-seller’s lower set of hands come up to lean on the counter. The upper set are still holding the knife. “Come on-” his eyes rake appraisingly over Keith “-kid. You think I don’t know it’s stolen?”

His heart beats a hard, angry pulse, and there’s a faint sense of attention from the place in his mind that belongs to Red. “It’s not stolen!” he hisses, and wrenches the knife back.

“Hey!”

The knife-seller shouts something after him, but he rounds the corner and keeps going, the knife back in its place. The momentum carries him through two more blocks before he crashes down on an unoccupied bench facing an ugly fountain. His right hand drifts towards the hilt at his back, but he thinks better of it, and the movement aborts. 

“Luxite, huh?” He mutters. Maybe it’s just a mineral that Earth happens to have in common with a dead planet, but he doesn’t think so. 

There’s a fuzzy set of memories that he doesn’t look at often because he doesn’t want to wear them out. He remembers walking through the desert at twilight, the tall presence of his father at his side, picking up crumbly red and grey rocks crusted with the shelly mineral ghosts of a dead sea. Paging through thick books in crinkly plastic covers from the library, filled with glossy photos of square crystals and gnarled lumps of ore, mouthing their names to himself until he knows them by heart. Gypsum and hematite and novaculite and pyrite. Limestones and schists and granites. 

In the months after he’d left the Garrison, the step at the back of the shed had slowly accumulated rocks. On one of his trips to town, he’d gone to the library and picked through the shelves for mineral guides and geology books. This time he’d read the text instead of just looking at the pictures, and out in the desert following the aching pull in his chest that might or might not have been grief, he’d recited mineral names like a mantra and thought about the phantoms of that Cretaceous sea stamped into the landscape.

Luxite isn’t one of the minerals he knows.

It could be a real name, but it sounds a lot more like the kind of thing the translators spit out when they try to get across the sense of a word that doesn’t exist in English, but has some close relatives. “Light ore” or “light metal” or “light rock” sound dumb and clunky, and the translators are definitely smart enough to know that he knows a lot of minerals that end in ‘-ite’.

So where does that leave him?

He tries to pose the question clearly, calmly. If he looks at it rationally, it’s just circumstantial evidence. Another coincidence shoring up the suspicion he’s been nursing. It doesn’t prove anything. 

He draws a breath, passes his thumb over his knuckles once. Again. He’s trying to be… better about this. To think it all the way through instead of just reacting. If he is galra, he’ll deal with it. But right now there’s nothing to prove it. He can’t screw everything up without knowing for sure.

The resolution eases some of the tension out of his neck, and he gingerly leans back against the bench, watching the crowd eddy and part around the fountain. 

It takes a moment for his brain to realize that one of the people queued up in front of the store across from him is galra. The tension all comes rushing back for a second, but it bleeds away just as quickly. They’re just standing there. A tall person in a ratty green jacket waiting in line for meat-on-a-stick. Once he’s looking, he spies others, and flinches internally when he realizes he hadn’t noticed them before because he’d expected them to be in uniform.

It’s the first time he’s really seen galra in a civilian setting. The person in line has a queue of hair so dark it’s almost indigo. A muscular woman dithering in front of an electronics stand has a complicated series of facial markings streaking up her neck and over her cheeks, and the taller, lankier woman next to her has symmetrical notches cut at the tips of her ears. He tries to remember if any of the galra he’s fought have looked like any of them, but just comes up with a blurred impression of tall figures in helmets and armor, anonymous and interchangeable. That leaves a sour taste in his mouth, and he stays there on the bench and watches a while, until they drift away with the rest of the crowd.

* * *

They’re going to the Blade of Marmora, Shiro tells them. The announcement sets a dreadful anticipation loose in his gut. He crosses his arms over his chest. The motion pulls the fabric of his jacket taut across his shoulders and blurs out some of the tension in his neck.  
  
“Are you sure about this?” Allura’s voice is clipped and precise.

“We’ve shaken off the tracking for now. We might not get another opportunity.” Shiro’s voice is quiet but steady. “We need allies, Allura. We can’t win a war by ourselves.” 

“We need allies we can trust.” She looks away for a moment. “I still think this is dangerous.”

“I know. We’ll be careful.”

A beat of silence holds and Keith holds his breath with it, but then Allura’s shoulders drop and she exhales. “Very well. Coran, set our course.”

“Of course, Princess.” 

He breathes out, feeling the prickle of eyes on him, and looks up to meet Shiro’s gaze. With an effort, he relaxes his hands and shoulders and Shiro looks away again.

There’s a brief flurry of questions and speculation, but it dies off quickly when the cow lows and lifts her tail threateningly. Pandemonium ensues as the realities of keeping a cow on a spaceship dawn on everyone and there is an abrupt mass exit. He moves to follow, but Shiro calls him back.

“Keith. You all right with this?” Against the dark of the window, Shiro’s hair stands out like a bolt of lightning. He’s examining him closely, his expression serious. “You seemed kind of uneasy there.”

He’s not sure what Shiro sees in his face, but there’s a second where words dam up behind his teeth like an avalanche. _That druid turned my hands purple. I put my hand on one of those galra door locks and it opened. I’ve got a knife that looks like the one Ulaz carried._

He swallows them down. Now that the briefing is over, Shiro’s posture has slackened a little, and he’s slowly closing and opening the fist of the prosthetic in the deliberate way he does when it hurts. Keith will find his answers and deal with them, one way or another. Shiro doesn’t need to worry about this until then.

“I’m fine.” He looks pointedly at Shiro’s right hand. “Are you all right?”

Shiro follows his eyes and grimaces before shaking his hand out. “Bad night,” he admits. “All that time meditating in Black didn’t do it any favors.” He hesitates for a long moment. “I saw Zarkon in there. Kind of shook me up.”

All the hair on the back of Keith’s neck stands up. “You what?” 

Shiro casts him a wry look. “Believe me, I wasn’t expecting it either.” He shakes his head, looks back out the window. “Black locked him out. It’s hard to imagine him as a paladin.”

He wants to agree with that, but when he thinks back on that fight with Zarkon on the flagship, he can kind of see it. An echo of Shiro’s absolute self-assurance, soured into arrogance. “Maybe he used to be different.”

“Maybe.” He runs his left hand through his hair. “Seriously, Keith. Are you okay with this? If you think there’s something off about it, I’ll listen.”

He meets Shiro’s eyes, hyperaware of the weight of the knife at his back. “We need allies. Like you said.”

Shiro watches him closely. After a moment, he sighs and gives a slow nod. “We do. We’re doing well. Better than well, for what we have. But we can’t keep this up. We can’t fight the galra-”

“The Empire.” The words jump out of him without his meaning them to. He feels off-balance, like he’s standing at the edge of a precipice, but he doesn’t want to take them back. He holds Shiro’s gaze and lifts his chin. “The Empire. Not the galra. That’s who we’re fighting, right?”

Shiro freezes in place. “I-,” he draws in a slow breath and lets it out again. “Yeah. You’re right. We need to remember that.” He closes his eyes for a moment, suddenly tired-looking. “ _I_ need to remember that.” 

“Saw some of them today at the space mall,” Keith says after a moment. “Not patrolling or anything. Just buying stuff.” 

Shiro’s face goes blank and nonplussed and he blinks. “I guess they have to shop like everyone else. I never really thought about it.”

“Me neither.”

They both fall silent, thinking that over. Shiro’s right hand resumes its rhythmic open and close.

“Keep calling me on that, all right?” he says quietly after a while. Keith looks at him questioningly, and he frowns. “Even if we don’t ally with the Blade of Marmora, that’s not the kind of person I want to be.” He meets Keith’s eyes again. “I know I can count on you to keep me honest.”

He doesn’t feel very honest, not with the weight of the knife at his back and the swarm of half-formed suspicions in his head. But he gives Shiro a nod anyways. “I can do that.”

Shiro smiles back at him and straightens up from his lean against the wall. “Thanks.” He claps his left hand to Keith’s shoulder. “Come on,” he says after a second. “Let’s go see what they did with the cow. I can’t believe you guys found a cow.”

A selfish, tenuous easement unfolds behind his ribs, and he follows Shiro out the door.


End file.
